Few Americans can claim to have lived a life of the mind as fully as Norman Podhoretz.
The son of Jewish immigrants, his father a milkman, and raised in a Brooklyn home without books, as he’d often recall, Podhoretz entered literary life as a journalist and a critic. He joined Commentary magazine in 1956 and became editor in chief in 1960. In the decades that followed, Podhoretz forged that periodical into one of the country’s most influential opinion journals, retiring after 35 years in the role in 1995. Commentary has been in continuous publication since 1945, and it continues to thrive to this day. That is due in no small part to the prominent role it played in America’s most important national debates for the better part of a century.
Podhoretz was among the founding members of a set of thinkers cast as the New York Intellectuals — a moniker that would be pretentious if its members hadn’t earned the title. He counted himself among the most persuasive philosophical minds of his day. Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Hannah Arendt — this was the company Podhoretz kept, and who likewise kept his.
Like so many of his compatriots, Podhoretz took with him into intellectual life the left-of-center outlook that was predominant among the literati of his day. He once mused that he’d never met a self-identified Republican until he was in high school. That began to change late in the last century as he and other disillusioned liberals recoiled from the so-called New Left roiling America’s college campuses and extolling the virtues of unreconstructed Marxism.
Podhoretz and his colleagues would become caustic critics of what he derided as a “revolt of the spiritually underprivileged.” What emerged from that revulsion was the Neoconservative movement. That became a philosophy that embraced the efficiency of markets and the moral primacy of the individual over the collective, one that emphasized the quotidian duties of governance and statecraft over the revolutionary allure of remaking the human condition.
The political tendency with which Podhoretz became synonymous is better known today less for its emphasis on broken-windows policing and supply-side economics than for its advocacy for an extroverted and confident American foreign policy. Podhoretz and his compatriots forged intellectual bonds with the titans of American public life — great minds like Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s, who never stopped calling himself a liberal, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became a Republican in 1985 after being unable to reconcile, in her words, liberal idealism’s penchant for masochism.
With these and other thinkers, Podhoretz helped craft an American foreign policy doctrine that translated Neoconservatives’ staunch anti-communism into a script with application in the post-Cold War world. For his efforts, Podhoretz was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2004. President George W. Bush called him a “fierce intellect” and a man who refused to “tailor his opinion to please others.”
You might say that. At times, Podhoretz had a rocky relationship with his fellow intellectuals, even going so far as to litigate his feuds in book-length arguments. But even at the height of their tensions, no one dared question his capabilities or his intellect. Norman Podhoretz never failed to evince the courage of his own convictions, articulating clearly and with passion what he knew to be right.
And what he knew was that militant Islam presents the West with a civilizational struggle. He knew that the state of Israel was a light in the darkness, a natural ally to those in the West who strive toward an enlightened liberal social covenant. He knew that Marxian socialism was a blight on mankind — the operationalization of the wickedness and avarice that attends to humanity’s immutable nature. And he knew that the United States was and remains a force for good in the world.
It’s an exceptional life that leaves such a legacy. It’s an uncommon magazine that had the cultural footprint his achieved — enjoying the honor of being namechecked in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in a reference his audience was expected to understand! Those of us who aspire to his legacy can only imagine a world in which literary and intellectual achievements like Podhoretz’s gain such recognition.
“He often quipped that he would forgive any insult if the person delivering it also said he was a good writer,” read the reflections on Norman Podhoretz’s life by his son and successor at Commentary’s helm, John Podhoretz. That perfectly encapsulates the devotion to the written word that typified Podhoretz’s remarkable career — a dedication that is all too rare today. Those of us who aspire to carry on his legacy are blessed to have been bequeathed a library of his prolific works — a compendium that guided the nation’s moral, spiritual, and cerebral evolution throughout his life and which will continue to shape the American national project in his absence.
Rest easy, Norman. We will carry the torch from here.